Raspberry Pi Weather Station and Display

I’ve always been a huge fan of Raspberry Pis and I’ll update this blog to show how I use them currently with a nod to how they have been used in the past.
Since my kids have always wanted to know what the weather is (is it going to be windy tonight daddy…..is it going to snow tomorrow daddy) I wanted to build a few gadgets that would help me answer this question, or better yet, show them the answer directly. Queue a Raspberry Pi, an LCD screen, conky and a script from github to create this:

The image on the right is the final output displayed via TFT screen from Adafruit. What you see on screen is a fullscreen Conky widget, overlaid on the desktop, with toolbars etc hidden (though you’ll notice that funny black rectangle bottom left that I haven’t figured out the cause of (think it is due to the “mouse” from the touchscreen overlay)). The Conky config to get to this is here.
The main part of the display is showing weather data that is pulled via a bash script I found on github, called fmeteo. I had to customise this script so it worked for me, changing the formatting of the output which I then run via crontab and redirect to two files, one to show the current forecast (a file called wttrn and one to show the forecast for the coming day: wttrf).

The modified version of the fmeteo script is here, no massive changes, just removing some output I didn’t need and reordering the formatting.
The second part of this was to actualy create and record some real weather data. I thus got hold of a combined pressure, humidity and temperature sensor, bme280. I hooked this up to the relevant GPIO pins on another Raspberry Pi and then made use of some cool weather data recording software I found on github: bme280 i2c raspberry webserver. This gives interesting historical data views over time, like this:
This I can then share with the kids and call out when it has been cold and hot.